A purported civil servant’s deeply unconstitutional views
Under our Constitution, which gives the operating instructions for the American government, there are three branches of government: The Legislative, the Executive, and the Judicial. However, the ever-burgeoning administrative state has long since taken for itself many powers from each of those branches. Now that the Executive branch is reclaiming its authority, the bureaucracy’s members are shocked to discover that no actual authority resides with them.
While we who voted for Trump to restore our border, bring sanity to our military, unleash our energy sector, and erase our government’s racial and sexual obsessions are utterly delighted with Trump’s shock and awe approach to governance, leftists are very, very sad. Many of them are engaging in ritualistic shrieking, weeping, and wailing, and while I know that schadenfreude isn’t a nice thing...I’m still reveling in it when I see things like this:
Selena Gomez sobs uncontrollably amid ramped up deportations of illegal aliens:
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) January 27, 2025
“I’m so sorry. All my people are getting attacked. The children, I don’t understand. I wish I could do something.”
"My people?" Aren't you American?
Where was the sobbing over the 100,000 Americans… pic.twitter.com/wvtoeRVQUw
Liberal white women are now screaming at Lake Michigan to cope with Donald Trump’s win. This is mental illness. 🤣 pic.twitter.com/XflcMJLRJM
— Tiffany Fong (@TiffanyFong_) November 27, 2024
Now that Trump is in office and the rubber is really hitting the road, the despair has moved from social media to the offices in D.C. government buildings. What started making the rounds today is a post that purportedly comes from someone in the Office of Personnel Management (“OPM”). This is the federal government’s employment office and, as of 2021, it had almost 2,500 employees. I assume it’s grown bigger on Biden’s watch.
Technically, the OPM’s job is to be the clearinghouse for hiring and firing employees, and for managing all their many federal benefits. However, at a more toxic level, thanks to President Biden, the OPM has also been responsible for seeding the federal government with DEI hires. The OPM DEI webpage has been 404’d thanks to Trump’s ending DEI in the federal government, but, as the saying goes, the internet never forgets:
Ah, the glory days of wokism in the federal government.
Now, to the tremendous horror of one purported OPM employee, the purge has in dead earnest started—and the worst part is that Donald Trump has the temerity to think he’s the boss:
This document deserves a paragraph-by-paragraph analysis because it reveals that this worker has no fealty to the Constitution or the American system. His loyalty is to the leftist bureaucracy. Specifically:
I’m a current employee at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). This is a throwaway account for obvious reasons. I’m posting this because people need to know what’s going on at OPM.
S/he/it may hate what’s happening, but there’s no way the writer will risk his/her/its job by stating openly what he believes are genuine threats to the government. And from his perspective, the threats are real:
I’ve been an OPM employee for nearly a decade and a Federal Employee for almost 20 years. I’ve never witnessed anything even remotely close to what’s happening right now. In short, there’s a hostile takeover of the federal civil service.
Think hard about that statement. The author is saying that the duly elected president exerting his constitutional authority over the federal workforce is a “hostile takeover.” The author reiterates that point in the following paragraph (emphasis mine):
Let me say this in no uncertain terms — OPM has been compromised and taken over. The very backbone of American Government, the HR of all HR in the U.S. Government has been taken over by outside politicals. In just five days, they managed to push aside dozens of non-political, career civil servants who were there specifically to prevent the civil service from becoming the President’s henchmen.
That emphasized language is the nub of the anti-constitutionalism that characterizes the administrative state. Under the Constitution, the president is the boss of the administrative state, not its servant. Yet this person is oozing despair and deep anger because the new boss is changing policies. S/he/it believes that the reverse is true: the civil service exists to limit, not to serve, the president.
For that reason, the writer is enraged that employees who will not cooperate with the new administration are getting sidelined:
The current Acting Director, Charles (Chuck) Ezell is a low-level branch chief. He’s the friendliest “yes man” you’ll ever meet. He never says no. It’s clear they pushed aside all the high-level non political civil servants who refused to do Donald Trump’s bidding, until they found Chuck.
If these people refused to do Trump’s bidding, they’re anything but “non-political,” no matter how much the unknown author reiterates that word.
Under his name, they’ve sent numerous requests to all the agencies to collect information on gov’t employees that they see as a threat to their agenda. Instructions say to send these lists to Amanda Scales. But Amanda is not actually an OPM employee, she works for Elon Musk. She wasn’t even properly cleared by OPM Personnel Security. (Emphasis mine.)
What I love is that last sentence. How dare the new administration put into place a person whom the hostile bureaucrats didn’t personally vet (and, presumably, reject)!
The writer continues:
Our CIO, Melvin Brown, (also a non political career public servant) was pushed aside just one week into his tenure because he refused to setup email lists to send out direct communications to all career civil servants. Such communications are normally left up to each agency.
Again, this person is very confused about the chain of command. S/he/it is upset that the administration sidelined someone who refused to make it possible for the president to speak directly with his employees without those communications first being mediated by hostile people in management. Also, the fact that Mr. Brown was only two weeks into his tenure tells us that he may well have been one of the people the Biden team planted in an effort to stymy Trump’s work reclaiming normalcy in the federal government.
And then the paranoia kicks in. The author is sure (probably correctly) that the new administration wants to gain access to the workforce to fire people!! Well, yes, and if a fussy leftist manager refuses to give them that information, they’re going to take it (and probably fire that manager, too):
Instead, an on-prem (on-site) email server was setup. Someone literally walked into our building and plugged in an email server to our network to make it appear that emails were coming from OPM. It’s been the one sending those various “test” message you’ve all seen. We think they’re building a massive email list of all federal employees to generate mass RIF [reduction in force] notices down the road.
At this point, the author bemoans his/her/its helplessness:
The non-political civil servants here at OPM are watching helplessly as our government is being systematically dismantled bit by bit. Even the IGs are being fired to prevent them from investigating the numerous whistleblower complaints we’ve filed.
Again, there are a lot of fascinating and wrong assumptions in the above statement. First, the government is not being dismantled. It is being returned to its constitutional roots. Federal employees were meant to be servants, not masters.
Second, as Daniel Bianco pointed out, the Inspectors General do not exist to police the president; they exist to police the agencies, and it’s quite clear they’ve been failing in that responsibility.
The writer ends with an exhortation demanding outside help for the resistance, and I found his/her/its plea heartening:
Please share this and tell the world that OPM is not the bad guy. We’re just as helpless to stop this as the rest of our fellow public servants. Hopefully someone out there can help us, but it’s looking pretty grim.
Did you get that? “We’re just as helpless to stop this as the rest of our fellow public servants.” That’s exactly the way it should be. The American people hired a new boss and he, not the bureaucracy, is in charge.
Image by Grok.